This first collection by award-winning author Kelly Link takes fairy tales and cautionary tales, dictators and extraterrestrials, amnesiacs and honeymooners, revenants and readers alike, on a voyage into new, strange, and wonderful territory. The girl detective must go to the underworld to solve the case of the tap-dancing bank robbers. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose father collects artificial noses. A dead man posts letters home to his estranged wife. Two women named Louise begin a series of consecutive love affairs with a string of cellists. A newly married couple become participants in an apocalyptic beauty pageant. Sexy blond aliens invade New York City. A young girl learns how to make herself disappear. These eleven extraordinary stories are quirky, spooky, and smart. They all have happy endings. Every story contains a secret prize. Each story was written especially for you.

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It's a peculiar collection of short stories, mainly fantasy with a bit of paranormal horror and lots of weird details.
There is a lot of imagination and ideas, unfortunately it seems that each story lacks something, in particular the endings are too much undetermined and this quite tired me.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose ★★★
The reconstruction of a man memories by the letters he sends to his wife from the hotel he staying at.
The man is dead and he does not remember even his wife's name.

Water Off a Black Dog's Back ★★
The librarian Carroll meet the strange parents of his girlfriend Rachel and their black dogs.
In the beginning the story is intriguing, and it is due to the mistery about Rachel and her parents, unfortunately the conclusion is quite confusing.

The Specialist's Hat ★★★
A story focused on death and Death with protagonists two twin sisters of ten years old. Also in this story the conclusion is quite vague and the reader has to understand/interpret it

Flying lessons ★★★.5
A mixture of mithology and modernity; I appreciated the story structured in non consequential steps.

Travels with the Snow Queen ★★★
Mixture of fairytales and modernity, the ending is quite nice.

Vanishing act

Survivor’S ball, or, the donner party

Shoe and marriage ★★★.5
Some short stories telling about fairy tales, modern times parody and marriages, very nice.

Most of my friends are two-thirds water ★★★.5
A malinconic short story about one sided loves and aliens.

Louise’s Ghost ★★★.5
The two best friend Louise and Louise, Louise's ghost, Louise's daughter and cellists, a -strange- story about friendship.

The girl detective ★★★.5
The girl detective reportage about her habits and her search for her mother.

Surreal Fantasy

Even though I had trouble figuring out exactly what these haunting, suggestive fantasy stories were about, I could recognize that the author is very talented. The tales often incorporate elements of f ...continue

Even though I had trouble figuring out exactly what these haunting, suggestive fantasy stories were about, I could recognize that the author is very talented. The tales often incorporate elements of familiar fairy tales but reworked in a rather disturbing and adult manner. I suspect people will generally get some very different messages from these stories, being as they are almost dream-like in quality, but few who read them shall deny that a great new talent is at work here.

This collection is available free for download from the excellent eBook site, www.feedbooks.com, as is most of Kelly Link's second collection, Magic For Beginners (which is missing two award-winning stories, though, that can be read elsewhere on the internet - see the comments on the Feedbooks site under the entry for Magic For Beginners to find out where the missing stories are freely available).

Kelly Link has won has won a Hugo award, three Nebula awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction already (circa 2010), and this début collection impressively includes wins for a Nebula Award for Best Novelette ("Louise's Ghost"), a World Fantasy Award ("The Specialist's Hat"), and a James Tiptree, Jr. Award ("Travels with the Snow Queen"). I found the story "Shoe And Marriage" to be one of the most disturbingly impressive entries, a strange mixture of foot-fetishism, Cinderella, sado-masochism, and Nazi-like fascism. Whatever you may think of Link, she certainly has a distinctive voice.

If you are a fan of the magical reality genre (e.g. Jorge Luis Borges, or Isabel Allende) then give this freely downloadable book a look-in. I generally prefer stories that have a definite conclusion and that follow a rational story line, yet Kelly Link's stories held my attention somehow, so do not necessarily dismiss this collection merely because it is more surreal and dream-like.

I read this on my Kindle. The ebook has an active contents page and is free of spelling and typographical errors, and one can easily navigate from story to story as each of them has an active and linked title.

At zero cost, this is a very worthwhile collection to read, or at least try out. Perhaps you will like the stories so much you will buy a hard-copy as a gift for someone, and so doing, support a very talented author.

The only reason I finished this book is because I read Magic for beginners first and I liked that one slightly more than this collection.
In the end, I guess Link just isn't for me. I like my stories ...continue

The only reason I finished this book is because I read Magic for beginners first and I liked that one slightly more than this collection.
In the end, I guess Link just isn't for me. I like my stories to make sense, to have some internal logic and structure I can follow and, possibly, an ending or a hint of an explanation my mind can work upon.
Link's stories instead feel to me more like a dream - scenes, images, moments where time slows down like molasses or jumps all over the place, where strange things happen without reason beyond 'odd is cool'. The characters felt just as dreamlike, devoid of life and motivations, and I couldn't really sympathize with them. I finished every segment asking myself what actually happened, and why, and why should I care.

If you like when people tell you their latest weird dreams, Kelly Link's books are definitely up your alley. If you're looking for stories, well, they're not.